A Feast of Demons

A rogue scientist has unlocked the secret to life and death itself, and the bill is coming due. Virgil Hampstead thought his college acquaintance Theobald Greco was merely eccentric, that harmless breed of brilliant recluse who talks to his equations. But Greco has been conducting experiments in his isolated laboratory, summoning entities he calls Maxwell's demons: invisible creatures that manipulate the flow of matter and energy at the molecular level. When these entities escape, the world descends into nightmare. People age decades in hours. Infants become elderly. The young grow young. Society fractures as the fundamental rhythm of life itself collapses into chaos. Written in 1962, this is vintage SF at its most provocative: a meditation on what happens when humanity gets exactly what it wants, and discovers it was never ready to handle it.